


Human (i forget you're not)

by fishpoets



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angsty Schmoop, Introspection, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-28
Updated: 2014-03-28
Packaged: 2018-01-17 08:26:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 950
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1380802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fishpoets/pseuds/fishpoets
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean is always surprised when they do this, when he pulls apart layers to get at naked skin.</p>
<p>(set just before 8.23)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Human (i forget you're not)

 

Dean is always surprised when they do this, when he pulls apart layers to get at naked skin.

 

He still half-expects Cas's body to be pale; skin milky and translucent-blue as it pulls across his torso, as if the being inside, the energy supernova of Grace, is glowing out through his arteries, exploding from within and breaking through the surface. He half-expects light to leak from every pore.

 

Dean feels he needs affirmation sometimes, of Castiel's otherness. He worries that Cas has become so familiar, so _comfortable_ , too much his Good Friend Cas, that Dean will forget what he really is. That he'll start taking him for granted, take his presence as given. That he'll lose sight of how he needs him and will use him all up, throw the dry corpse aside like he's done with so many others. Hell, he's done it to Cas before; treated him as a tool, a means to an end. Just a man with handy super powers.

 

That sort of complacency, he's found, always comes before loss. It's the receding of the sea before a tidal wave, and it terrifies him. Right down through his bones. (He's forgotten before, after all – gotten too settled, content – and then it always ends, and it hurts. Every time, it _hurts._ ) So he imagines light; light – furious, burning light, all that he knows of what angels really are – filling his friend to the brim of his human shell, brilliant and cold and endless.

 

But beneath the rumpled wrapping of his clothes Cas is warmth and flesh, his skin a shade darker than Dean's summer tan. Tangible. Touchable. There is nothing otherworldly in the dust of crooked hair across his navel. Nothing spiritual about the skip of his muscles as Dean palms him, or the rise of his ribs as he breathes.

 

Dean doesn't think Cas even needs to breathe. Yet he does.

 

It makes it all too easy to forget.

 

"Dean..." A hand comes up to frame his face, warm brown fingers practiced and assured. These hands had once been stiff, strange to the creature that carried them and wielded only with the power of Heaven, merely conduits to perform miracles and exorcisms. Now they are fluent with human idiosyncrasy and bodily idiom. They know how to fire a gun. They caress. Dean can still see their phantoms, sometimes – popping the cap off a pill case, wrapped round a bottle's neck.

 

These are not Castiel's real hands. It's only because of Dean that he kept them, learned to move them with such natural ease.

 

Dean pushes his face into the hand anyway, screws his eyes shut as Cas massages the soft hair at his temple.

 

“Dean, look at me.”

 

What choice has he but to comply?

 

He looks down into blue, and there, there it is – average human eyes in an average human face. A welcome face, trusted and known, but...

 

This isn't right. He searches desperately for any hint of the Divine in the lines of his friend's smile.

 

(But of course, he's forgotten – God doesn't want to be found. He is nowhere in Castiel's frown, either.)

 

“What's the matter?”

 

What's the matter? That Castiel has had his will usurped by his family? That he's had his very nature turned against him, to the point where he would favor mutilation? That he sees this as _just?_

 

Or simply that he's here, between Dean's arms, at all?

 

He'd say he's sorry, but his friend would only tell him that it's not his fault. It's not Dean's problem.

 

Cas sits up, pushing Dean back on to his haunches, and peers at him concernedly. “Dean? Dean, talk to me.”

 

Parroting Dean's words back at him. He pulls Cas's hands from his face and holds them together in his lap, tries to remember the steel under skin, barely held in check as this fist fell against his face. Tries to remember the rush, the electric sting of grace as this hand cupped his cheek and healed him. That split second he felt connected to an entire ocean, could see the whole of it, but feel only drops upon his skin.

 

He mustn't get complacent; Cas isn't human. No matter how much Dean needs him, wants him – _loves_ him – Cas has another home, and he'll always choose there over being stuck in the mud with messy, messed-up Dean. He always leaves, and one day he won't come back. That's just facts.

 

Dean squeezes Cas's hands between his own, squeezes his eyes shut. Perhaps Naomi was right, after all. Cas just doesn't need him. Not like he needs Cas. He's an angel, after all, he doesn't have the equipment to care – not the way that Dean hopes for, secretly and shamefully, because Cas wasn't made to play house; to sit around a table, waiting for a home-cooked meal; to spend the night, every night, until his hair is thinned and gray. That isn't an option for them.

 

“I'm fine, Cas,” he says, because he is, he _is_. He has to be. “Just kinda tired.”

 

Lips touch his forehead, warm and damp; they bless his eyelids, the tip of his nose, then trail down to his mouth, softly, beckoning. He buries himself in the kiss.

 

Cas doesn't smell like lightning, or the air before a storm. He smells of nothing, really; the absence of scent of a person who isn't fresh-washed and soap-stained, but who neither has started to sweat. All he is is body-hot, firm but giving under Dean's chest as he pushes them down into the covers.

 

*****

 

( Dean doesn't know this, but soon he won't have to worry about the light under Castiel's skin. )

 

( It's three days before the sky falls. )

 


End file.
